Wednesday 9 November 2011 07.44 EST
First published on Wednesday 9 November 2011 07.44 EST

Assiduous sleuthing by James Bond fans has forced QR Markham's newly published spy thriller Assassin of Secrets to be pulled from shelves after it was discovered that it was lifted almost wholesale from an amalgamation of other novels, including 007 titles.

The novel by QR Markham – an alias for Brooklyn bookseller and poet Quentin Rowan – was published last week in the US and was due out this week in the UK. The story of "top operative" Jonathan Chase, who will "protect and serve his country at all costs" as he battles "shadowy organisation" the Zero Directorate who are "kidnapping, interrogating and murdering spies", it had reaped a host of pre-publication praise, described as an "instant classic [which] takes on the greatest spy thrillers of the cold war and doesn't just hold its own, but wins" by the author Jeremy Duns, and given a starred review from US book bible Kirkus, which described it as "a dazzling, deftly controlled debut that moves through familiar territory with wry sophistication".

The territory, alas, turned out to be all too familiar, and after the plagiarism was uncovered by online commenters on a James Bond forum, Assassin of Secrets was withdrawn from sale in the US – its American publisher Little, Brown is offering a refund to customers who bought it – while its UK publisher Hodder & Stoughton is also pulling the novel, saying in a statement this morning:

"We take copyright issues very seriously, as we do all aspects of the publishing process. We deeply regret having acquired a book for our list that we can no longer accept as an original work, and in partnership with Little, Brown we have acted immediately to recall the book from distributors and retailers."

Hodder is asking booksellers to return the book for full credit, with consumers looking for a refund told to return it to the retailer where they bought the novel.

The books copied in Assassin of Secrets range from John Gardner's James Bond novels to titles by Robert Ludlum and Charles McCarry. Edward Champion laid out a staggering series of almost verbatim lifted passages on his cultural website Reluctant Habits, while Duns, author of the spy novel Free Agent, admitted "it's dunce's cap time for me" on his own blog. Duns was alerted to allegations of plagiarism of Gardner's 1981 Bond novel License Renewed on a 007 forum, took out his copy of the novel and found that several passages in Markham's novel were taken from Gardner's, including "one scene that was, word for word apart from the names, the same as one in Licence Renewed, for six pages straight".

Duns began to take sentences at random from the Markham, entering them into Google Books and finding they were lifted from novels including Raymond Benson's Bond novel Zero Minus Ten, McCarry's spy thriller Second Sight and from The Prometheus Deception by Ludlum, eventually concluding that "it looks to me like pretty much every sentence in it was taken from elsewhere".

"He seemed to have taken most of his action scenes and dialogue from post-Fleming Bond novels (at least six of Gardner's), and added long poetic descriptions from several of McCarry's books, as well as the back-story for his protagonist. A bizarre personal playlist of his favourite moments in the genre, I guess, all sewn together with the magic of Controls C and V," said Duns. "I immediately emailed the publisher, explaining the situation and giving the example from the Bond message board and all the others I had found, and asking them to remove the Q&A I had done with him from their websites – he had of course also plagiarised many of his comments in it, from Dream Time by Geoffrey O'Brien, which was also the source for much of his book's prologue – and to withdraw the book."

Champion points out that it was not only Hodder and Little, Brown who were duped by Markham: a passage from his collection Bethune Street, written under his real name Rowan and published in the esteemed literary journal the Paris Review, was lifted from Graham Greene's Our Man in Havana. Rowan writes: "Time gives poetry to a battlefield, or some equivalent modern-day gathering at the rim of the awful, and perhaps these St Luke's girls were like little flowers on an old rampart where an attack had been repulsed with heavy loss many years ago", while Greene writes: "Time gives poetry to a battlefield, and perhaps Milly resembled a little the flower on an old rampart where an attack had been repulsed with heavy loss many years ago."

Duns described himself as "embarrassed and irritated" at having been tricked, but said the whole situation – Markham pulling the wool over the eyes of two publishers as well as numerous reviewers – was also "fairly mind-boggling [and I] have no idea how Mr Rowan thought he could get away with it".

Simon Gardner, the son of John Gardner, said he hoped "the exposure of this act of plagiarism will act as a lesson to others that think they might try to dupe publishers and the public alike". "Whether the authors are alive or dead, there are enough fans of popular fiction to come down fast and hard on anyone who tries to rip off their favourite authors. That is the power of fans and I salute and thank you all on behalf of John Edmund Gardner," he wrote on Facebook.

Lisa Moylett, Gardner's literary executor, also praised her author's fans for uncovering the plagiarism. "You don't mess with Bond fans: they watch and monitor everything and are a very well-organised community," she said. "But it's the extraordinary cheek of it … he should be utterly ashamed of himself. It is extraordinary that he thought he could dupe publishers and public alike. I think the public were a little more on the ball than the publishers here … Editors today are 12 years old and don't know the history of what they are buying. We were absolutely stunned by this."